General Order No. 11 (1863)
Not to be confused with General Order No. 11 (1862) painting of General Order No. 11. In this famous work General Thomas Ewing is seated on a horse watching the Red Legs.]] General Order No. 11 is the title of a Union Army decree issued during the American Civil War on 25 August 1863, forcing the evacuation of rural areas in four counties in western Missouri. The order, issued by Union General Thomas Ewing, affected all rural residents regardless of their loyalty. Those who could prove their loyalty to the Union were permitted to stay in the region, but had to leave their farms and move to communities near military outposts. Those who could not do so had to vacate the area altogether. Origin and implementation of the order Order No. 11 was issued four days after the August 21 Lawrence Massacre, a retaliatory effort led by the notorious bushwhacker leader William Quantrill. The Union Army believed the guerrillas drew their support from the rural population of four Missouri counties on the Kansas border south of the Missouri River. These were Bates, Cass, Jackson, and Vernon. Federal forces intended to end this by any means necessary, no matter what the cost to innocent civilians. Ewing's decree ordered the expulsion of all non-Unionist residents from these counties, and commanded that their homes be burned. Exceptions were made for those living within one mile of the town limits of Independence, Hickman Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville. The area of Kansas City, Missouri north of Brush Creek and west of the Blue River, referred to as "Big Blue" in the order, was also spared. President Abraham Lincoln approved Ewing's order, but he cautioned that the military must take care not to permit vigilante enforcement. This warning was almost invariably ignored. Ewing issued his order a day before he received a nearly identical directive from his superior, Major General John Schofield. And in some ways Ewing's order was the lesser of several greater evils. Kansans were angry over Quantrill's raid and destruction. Several of Ewing's long-time friends were killed in Lawrence. Further, Ewing's order came in the face of dire threats from radical Senator James Lane to lead a jayhawking raid through Missouri that would destroy more than four Missouri counties. On September 9, 1863, convinced Ewing was not acting harshly enough, Lane gathered nearly a thousand Kansans at Paola, Kansas, and marched towards Westport, Missouri, with an eye towards destruction of that pro-slavery town. Ewing sent several companies of his old Eleventh Kansas to stop Lane's advance, by force if necessary. Lane backed down.Henry E. Palmer, The Lawrence Raid Kansas Historical Collections 6 (1900): 317, at 322-323. Whereas Ewing's decree at least tried to distinguish between pro-Union and pro-Confederate, Schofield's allowed no exceptions and was clearly harsher. Ewing's order was allowed to stand, and Schofield would later describe it as "wise and just; in fact, a necessity."John M. Schofield, Forty-six Years in the Army (New York: Century, 1897), pg. 83. Ewing ordered his troops not to engage in looting or other depredations, but he was simply unable to control them. Most were Kansas volunteers who regarded all Missourians as "rebels" to be punished. Animals and farm property were stolen or destroyed; houses, barns and outbuildings burned to the ground. The four counties became a devastated "no-man's-land", with only charred chimneys and burnt stubble showing where homes and thriving communities had once stood. Ironically, Ewing's order had the opposite military effect from what he intended. Instead of eliminating the guerrillas, it gave them immediate unlimited access to supplies. Chickens, hogs and cattle wandered about, abandoned when their owners were forced to flee. Smokehouses were sometimes found to contain hams and bacon, while barns might hold feed for horses.http://www.civilwarstlouis.com/History2/castelorder11.htm. Retrieved on 11 July 2008. Ewing eased his order in November, issuing General Order No. 20, which permitted the return of those who could prove their loyalty to the Union. In January 1864 command over the border counties passed to General Egbert Brown, who disapproved of Order No. 11 and almost immediately replaced it with a new directive that allowed anyone who would take an oath of allegiance to the Union to return and rebuild their home. Ewing's controversial order had greatly disrupted the lives of thousands of civilians, most of whom were certainly innocent of any guerrilla collaboration. However, there is no evidence that Order No. 11 seriously hindered Confederate military operations. No raids into Kansas took place after its issuance, but historian Albert Castel credits this to strengthened border defenses and a better organized Home Guard, plus a guerrilla focus on operations in northern and central Missouri in preparation for General Sterling Price's 1864 invasion.. The infamous destruction and hatred inspired by Ewing's Order No. 11 would persist throughout western Missouri for many decades as the affected counties slowly tried to recover. George Bingham and Order No. 11 American artist George Caleb Bingham, who was staunchly pro-Union, called Order No. 11 an "act of imbecility" and wrote letters protesting it. Bingham wrote to Gen. Ewing, "If you execute this order, I shall make you infamous with pen and brush," and in 1868 created his famous painting reflecting the consequences of Ewing's harsh edict (see above). Former guerrilla Frank James, a participant in the Lawrence, Kansas raid, is said to have commented: "This is a picture that talks."http://www.mo-river.net/Arts/georgecalebbingham.htm. Retrieved on 11 July 2008. Bingham, who was in Kansas City at the time, described the events: It is well-known that men were shot down in the very act of obeying the order, and their wagons and effects seized by their murderers. Large trains of wagons, extending over the prairies for miles in length, and moving Kansasward, were freighted with every description of household furniture and wearing apparel belonging to the exiled inhabitants. Dense columns of smoke arising in every direction marked the conflagrations of dwellings, many of the evidences of which are yet to be seen in the remains of seared and blackened chimneys, standing as melancholy monuments of a ruthless military despotism which spared neither age, sex, character, nor condition. There was neither aid nor protection afforded to the banished inhabitants by the heartless authority which expelled them from their rightful possessions. They crowded by hundreds upon the banks of the Missouri River, and were indebted to the charity of benevolent steamboat conductors for transportation to places of safety where friendly aid could be extended to them without danger to those who ventured to contribute it.http://www.rulen.com/partisan/gcb11.htm. Retrieved on 11 July 2008. Bingham insisted that the real culprits behind most of the depredations committed in western Missouri and eastern Kansas were not the pro-Confederate bushwhackers, but rather pro-Union Jayhawkers and "Red Legs," whom he accused of operating under the protection of General Ewing himself. According to Bingham, Union troops might easily have defeated the Bushwhackers if they had tried hard enough, and exercised a requisite amount of personal courage.Castel, ibid Albert Castel refutes Bingham's assertions, however, demonstrating that Ewing made conspicuous efforts to rein in the Jayhawkers, and to stop the violence on both sides. He furthermore argues that Ewing issued Order No. 11 at least partly in a desperate attempt to stop a planned Unionist raid on Missouri to exact revenge for the Lawrence massacre, to be led by Kansas Senator Jim Lane himself.Palmer, ibid; Castel, ibid Further scholarship indicates when Bingham's son used the painting in 1880 to attack Ewing when he ran for Governor of Ohio, it was not the deciding influence in Ewing's narrow loss. President Rutherford Hayes, a Ewing family friend but political opponent of Ewing's campaign, urged Ohio Republicans not to use the painting as it would show Ewing's strong war record against the south, which was contrary to the efforts they were using to show Ewing as a weak business leader and dangerous repudiationist on hard money/soft money issues.Walter E. Busch, “General, You Have Made the Mistake of Your Life.” Masters diss., California State University, Dominguez Hills, 2001; Ronald D. Smith, "Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General," University of Missouri Press (2008), p. 335. This more recent scholarship reviews Ohio newspaper accounts of the 1880 campaign, and indicates Ewing, running as a Democrat, faced significant third party candidacies and was trying to oust Republicans during a time of a good economy, always a difficult political task.ibid Text of General Order No. 11 Notes See also *Scorched earth *total war *General Thomas Ewing, Jr. *James H. Lane (Senator) External links *Historic Lone Jack *Missouri Partisan Ranger *"Order No. 11 and the Civil War on the Border" by Albert Castel Category:American Civil War documents Category:Missouri in the American Civil War 11 (1863) Category:Kansas in the American Civil War